Sunday, January 24, 2010

Secretary Clinton’s Internet Freedom Speech, Abridged « Clay Shirky

[Ed. note: I attended Secretary Clinton's speech on internet freedom on Thursday the 21st, which I thought was a good combination of principle, policy, and illustrative stories. Talking to people afterwards, the commonest question was "What did the Secretary commit the State Department to?" The text below is my attempt to answer that question.

I don't have any inside information about the particulars of the State department's plans; the text below is simply an abridged version of the speech, from which I removed everything except statements you could judge future actions of the State Department on. Stripped of it's context (and with my apologies to the speech writers), my read of the speech is that the success or failure of our internet freedom policy will come down to our ability to live up to the principles outlined below. -clay]